Magic, Machines and the Awakening of Danny Searle

by John McWilliams

  “How come you didn’t mention anything?” My father looked at me.

  “Me? Don’t bring me into this.”

  “Didn’t you see her all dressed up this morning?”

  “How should I have known where she was going?”

  “I only mentioned it like three times,” my mother said.

  “Kids.” My father huffed.

  “Kids? He’s acting just like you.”

  “No, I’m not,” I blurted.

  “It’s true,” she said. “Remember I asked you to bring the girls over here earlier, but you had to stop by José’s?”

  “I couldn’t take them in my van—there’s no place for the car seats.”

  My mother looked at me. She raised an eyebrow.

  “Oh, right,” I muttered. “But it’s still his fault.”

  “I certainly don’t disagree with that.” She looked at my father. “So, are you at least going to let us in?”

  “Of course—sorry.” He picked up Tara and Jasmine, who had been uncharacteristically quiet during this conversation. “Not really cold enough for earmuffs, is it?” he asked.

  “They insisted,” my mother explained as we approached the break table.

  “It’s cold enough for us,” Tara said.

  My father set the girls down on the foldout chairs.

  “So, how are my two young ladies this morning?”

  “Well, we’re not sure,” Tara said maturely.

  “What seems to be the problem?” My father winked at my mother.

  “It seems we don’t have someone to watch us.”

  “That is a problem, indeed.”

  “Where were you two off to?” my mother asked, running a brush through her hair.

  “Warwick. We’re supposed to meet with Vincent. We’re picking up the latest control chip.”

  “Flying?”

  “That was the plan.”

  “Does Tyler need to go?”

  “Yes,” my father said before I could open my mouth.

  “Well then, take the girls with you. Vincent won’t mind. You two want to take a trip in your dad’s airplane?”

  “Will he make us pee in bottles?” Tara asked.

  “It was only a suggestion,” my father explained to my mother. “And they held it in, right girls? Just make sure you drain your bladders before we go. If we have to stop at every airport along the way, we might as well drive.”

  “What’s a bladder?” Jasmine asked.

  “You know what?” My father looked at the office door. “I’ll be right back.” He returned a moment later with Danny. “Problem solved. Danny’ll watch them.”

  “Nice to meet you, Danny,” my mother said. “The girls seem to think you’re the Good Witch of the North.”

  Danny shook my mother’s hand and gave the twins hugs. “How can you hear with those big earmuffs on?”

  The girls shrugged.

  “Aiden isn’t bullying you into this, is he?” my mother asked.

  “Not at all. I’d love to watch them.”

  “You weren’t exactly hired to be a babysitter. Are you sure?”

  “She’s fine,” my father said. He turned to Danny, adding, “And if they get on your nerves, just toss them in front of the TV.”

  “Or duct tape them to the ceiling,” I suggested.

  “Don’t worry,” Danny assured my mother. “I won’t duct tape them to anything. And I think we can find something fun to do without resorting to TV.”

  My mother kissed the girls goodbye and turned to me. “The only thing I like about these heels is that they make me almost as tall as you.”

  “Not quite.” I moved my hand from my chin to the top of her head.

  “Tall enough to do this.” She pecked me on the cheek and whispered in my ear, “Danny’s very pretty.”

  “Goodbye, Mom.” I steered her toward the door. “Have a safe trip.” As she left, I wiped the lip gloss off my cheek, feeling like I was ten.

  ****

  Twenty minutes later, my father and I climbed out of his Jeep Cherokee at Gabreski Airport. A brisk forty-five degrees under pale blue skies, the wind was gusting to fifteen knots, kicking the sand up off the tarmac. In the distance, a Cessna 150 touched down with a one-two chirp. Besides that, the place was dead.

  My father pre-flighted his 1998 Piper Saratoga—his red and white, six-passenger corporate expense—while I, trying to avoid the wind, faced toward the hangar where he kept his Bellanca Citabria, an acrobatic stunt plane he used mostly for scaring the hell out of his students. The cold of the asphalt had already permeated my shoes.

  “I know you’re not exactly thrilled about this,” he said from under one of the wings. He glanced at the fuel he had just drained from the sump and poured it downwind. “But once you see the full scope of what we have planned”—he crawled out and began checking the wings and the tail section; I followed, hands deep in my pockets—“I think you’re really going to have fun with this one.” He stopped and looked at me. “I told you you should have worn a heavier jacket.”

  Mere minutes later, we were buckled in and adjusting our headsets. My father turned on the master switch and the instrument gyros began to whir. He cranked the engine and, through the windscreen, the propeller flipped and flipped until the cylinders caught and erupted into a steady roar.

  On the way out to the runway I kept the door cracked, preferring the cold, fresh air to the stench of sunbaked aviation fuel and Plexiglas cleaner.

  “Time to close up,” my father said when we reached the end of the field. “You feeling okay? You should have eaten something.”

  He reached into the seat behind us and found a 3 Musketeers bar, all while spinning the plane around and facing us down the runway. “Here. There’s also a thermos of coffee and a couple of donuts back there. They’re a little stale, but…”

  “This’ll be fine.” I held up the candy bar.

  “Professor,” I heard a female voice say in my headset. It was the tower. “Eventually someone else is going to want to use that runway. Take off or vacate.”

  “Sorry, Sam,” my father said. “Just winding up the old rubber band.” He winked at me and added, “What does Simon say?”

  “Simon says go! You’re such a pain in my butt.”

  My father increased the throttle and we accelerated down the runway.

  “Professor,” Sam said as our wheels left the ground. “For God’s sake, learn the rules. You’re cleared for a straight-out departure to the north. Try to have a safe flight, would you?”

  “Will do. Thanks Sam. Three-Four-Three-Echo-Bravo.”

  We climbed steeply toward fifty-five hundred feet.

  “There’s water in that side pocket, by the way,” my father said, his voice scratchy over the intercom.

  “How long’s it been in here?” I unscrewed the bottle’s top.

  “A week, maybe.” He shrugged. “I’m sure it’s fine.”

  Turbulence jostled the plane and water ran down my chin. “Nice.” I glared at him accusingly, but he was toying with his new handheld GPS and didn’t notice.

  For the next ten minutes, as the engine droned and we seemed to hit every pothole in the sky, I leaned against my window, studying the polygons below—houses, pools, baseball fields—wondering what Danny and the twins were up to.

  “Danny say anything about her dating anyone?” My voice echoed back at me in my headphones.

  “Just that magician friend of hers.”

  “But that’s over with—right?”

  “From what I understand, they dated for nearly four years. Things like that don’t just end overnight.”

  “But they do end. How old is he?”

  “Early thirties—I think. And he’s rich.”

  “So?”

  “I’m just telling you.” He tapped a few keys on the GPS. “Can you grab me one of those donuts?”

  “You mean one of those stale donuts?” I reached over the seat and retrieved one of the powdery Dunkin’ Donuts
fossils.

  After another minute or so, my father set the GPS aside and began lecturing me on the significance of winning the A.I. XPRIZE. I half-listened while glancing down at the Long Island Sound, dreaming about Danny.

  “Don’t worry,” he was saying by the time we reached the Connecticut shoreline. “We’re not cloning a brain—just modeling it. You’ll be creating a CPL program based on the Prometheus Template Model; then, later, that’s what we’ll be instantiating into the physical nodes.”

  “To create your brain in a vat?”

  “To create our brain in a vat.”

  ****

  We landed at Warwick Municipal Airport and parked as close as possible to the coffee shop—and to Vincent, waving from the other side of a chain-link fence. Vincent, wearing a dark blue suit and tie, rotund and mustachioed, looked an awful lot like Super Mario from Mario Brothers.

  We deplaned and, after a few humiliating anecdotes about what a troublemaker I had been at five, Vincent drove us to a Georgio’s Americana Café in town.

  At a table facing an orange-curtained window, overlooking a picturesque leaf-strewn New England main street, my father and Vincent dug right into the Warwick Chip—its performance characteristics, pin configuration, clock rate optimization, and so on. They debated back and forth, using charts and graphs, highlighting relevant information with colorful markers, while I sat back and enjoyed my burger, fries, and apple pie à la mode—just a spectator at a high-tech tennis match.

  Then my father’s cellphone rang and the match was halted.

  He took the call outside while our waitress cleared the table and Vincent seized on the opportunity to tell me about his CPL (Complexity Programming Language) program.

  Vincent explained that what he was trying to do was design a program that would optimize the grounding points of a circuit, using performance feedback from an electronic test station. He analogized the ebbs and flows of electrons in the ground plane to that of waves and currents in a river. He opened his briefcase and pushed a block diagram with his pseudocode across the table at me.

  “What do you think?” he asked after a few minutes.

  “Well… first, you can’t design the alpha code—the agent template—separate from the environmental code,” I told him. “They have to work together. That’s why you have all these linear clean-up routines in here.” I picked up a pen. “May I?”

  “Would you prefer my laptop?”

  “Definitely.” I dropped the pen onto my father’s pile of notes.

  Vincent placed his laptop on the table and opened his project in an open source CPL code editor. He spun the laptop around to face me. I immediately logged on to the Cobalt utility website and downloaded a generic CPL alpha-environment template. Then, while I modified that based on his original code, I downloaded the latest CPL-X evolutionary compiler.

  “Okay.” I turned the laptop so we both could see. “You see, if the environment is doing its job, the agents can remain lean and mean and, above all, adaptable. The environment steers the agents, not the other way around.”

  “Lean and mean,” Vincent muttered.

  “That’s right. And once the multitudes of agents form these higher-level arrays, they can handle the routines you were trying to hardcode in.” I made a few adjustments to his default parameters and ran the program in CPL-X. “Now, see how the agents are performing these operations?”

  “Yes,” Vincent said.

  “Okay, but watch. If I vary the inputs slightly and correct the outputs—you see, the system learns and the alpha code adapts. The environment is allowing the agents to become what they need to become.”

  Finally, I connected the program to Vincent’s database and streamed the output into a graph-X plotting program, displaying the results in a separate window. I pointed at the chart: “Here. Those are your grounding points, and there—there’s your convergence.”

  “Holy hell! This is phenomenal! It’ll probably take me weeks to figure out what you just did.” He leaned back, his chair sounding like a tree limb about to give way, and laughed uproariously.

  “This still needs a lot of work,” I warned him.

  “I know, I know. But you’ve just moved me a hundred miles from where I was.” He looked at me curiously. “For just one day I’d like to see the world the way you do. You are truly a phenomenon.”

  “I’m just familiar with this kind of programming. I grew up with it.”

  “You grew up with it?” Vincent chuckled. “Tyler, over the years, I’ve seen you turn out one amazing program after another—and you think that that’s just because you happened to have a few computers to play with while you were growing up?” He wiped his forehead with a napkin, composing himself.

  “There’s more to it than that. I’m sure you know that.” I watched a swirl of leaves blow past the café’s window. “I was a guinea pig in my father’s brain plasticity experiments. He molded my brain to work with CPL.”

  “You amuse me, Tyler. You don’t think your abilities might have something to do with having two brilliant parents? You’re smart as hell like your mom and stubborn as hell like your dad. If you ask me”—the cafe door chimed; it was my father returning—“never underestimate the power of genetics.”

  “We need to get going,” my father said.

  “What’s up?” I asked, pushing away from the table, anxious to escape Vincent’s avuncular intervention.

  “Danny has a class at eight and it turns out your mom won’t be back until sometime after nine.”

  “What about Ishana?”

  “She’s tied up at Cobalt. I told Danny we could make it back by seven.”

  “You think we can?”

  “Not standing here.” My father threw four twenties on the table.

  “Whoa,” Vincent said. “That’s way too much.”

  “Forget it.” My father handed Vincent his overcoat and guided him out into the chilly, late afternoon Massachusetts air. “If we can get off the ground in the next twenty minutes, we should be fine.”

  “How?” I asked, glancing at my cellphone to check the time before pulling the back door of Vincent’s Buick shut.

  “I know a few shortcuts,” my father said.

  “Wonderful.”

  By the time we arrived at the airport, the blue taxiway lights were on, the sun was like molten lava below the trees, and it was colder, much colder. My father did an abbreviated preflight and we climbed aboard while Vincent, now donning a gray scarf and woolen hat, watched from behind the airport fence. As the engine roared, I latched the cabin door and secured the box with the sample Warwick Chip in it. My father spun us around, dusting poor Vincent.

  “Sorry, Vincent,” I heard my father’s voice crackle over the intercom.

  Less than three minutes later, we were airborne and banking south, skimming low over the houses and trees. When we leveled our wings, we ascended steeply toward sixty-five hundred feet and a second chance at the evening’s sunset. In the western sky, brilliant red and orange rays stretched out from the horizon.

  “Pretty, isn’t it?”

  I nodded, staring into the flames.

  “Were you able to help Vincent with his program?”

  “I think so.”

  “Good.” My father glanced east, the orange sunset reflecting off his microphone. “Your mother didn’t sound too thrilled, by the way.”

  “And what about Danny?”

  “She seemed fine. Just hoping to make her class.”

  Below, more and more lights were coming on—cars, stores, streetlights. My wing dipped, and the sunset, already fading, appeared a watery orange blur in the white metal surface. After a minute or two, my father turned on the instrument panel lights. The altimeter read sixty-five hundred feet, the artificial horizon showed us level, and the airspeed indicator had us at one hundred and sixty knots.

  The plane hit a bump and my stomach floated into my chest.

  “Is that red line there for a reason?” I asked, referring
to the airspeed indicator.

  “Oh, this old girl’s not even close to being taxed.” He tapped on the gauge as if knocking on wood. He then switched on the overhead map light and started playing with the GPS. “You know, once we get back, I was thinking we should get you set up with a workstation and have Ishana familiarize you with Prometheus.”

  “I don’t remember saying I’d work on Prometheus.”

  “Come on, Tyler. I have a couple of awesome machines still in boxes. We could get you set up tomorrow.”

  The plane shuddered.

  “How about you just concentrate on getting us home.”

  “It’s just a little turbulence. Look—” He fixed his eyes on me. “Do we really need to play this same old game? You know you’re going to do this project. It’s a huge opportunity, and everyone’s counting on you.”

  I frowned, letting a minute of silence pass. Above the feeble glow of the instrument panel, the sky had turned an ominous black. Out my window, below, lights flickered between thickening clouds.

  “Especially Danny,” he finally added.

  “I knew it. Is that why you hired her? For leverage?”

  “No, it certainly is not.” He shrugged. “But it is a perk.”

  I turned toward my window. It was the same old game. The same old game he always managed to win. But who am I kidding? It’s not like I can win this time, either. This time he has Danny. I bit my tongue. No sense in prolonging this any further. “Fine,” I told him. “But just give me the information. I don’t need Ishana’s help.”

  “All right then. Good.” He patted my arm. “But the Prometheus project isn’t going to be like anything you’ve ever worked on before. You won’t be designing it to solve anything in particular. It’ll be more like a generic thinking machine. You’ll be making ‘thinking stuff.’” He smiled. “Well, that’s a bit nebulous, but you’ll see.”

  “The agent portion of my program is going to be instantiated into those N5 nano-nodes?”